CHAPTER 327: CHAPTER 206: THE DEVELOPMENT OF VARIOUS WORKSHOPS

It turns out that the rebel soldiers who wanted to surrender were mainly poor people from Great Greece. When the rebel army was winning one victory after another, they were fervent supporters of continuing the fight against the Romans in Italy instead of fleeing to the Alps. However, this period of being besieged in the Regium region was difficult, and the powerful image of the Roman Army once again filled their timid hearts. Taking advantage of the chaos, they quietly slipped away from the troops and ended up surrendering to the Roman Army that had come to their rescue.

Crassus immediately interrogated these soldiers, thereby learning that there were still parts of the rebel army lurking in the Regium region.

He made a quick decision: instead of pursuing the breakout rebel army, he immediately dispatched two legions to capture the rebel camp in the Regium region.

Remaining in the Regium region were the forces of Attutmus. Since his troops included many sailors, they were logically tasked with the important duty of crossing the sea to Sicily. Though they had hidden the provisions and other supplies in the camp, when they saw the Romans wantonly destroying the camp and burning the army tents, some soldiers couldn’t help but violate military orders and came out from hiding.

Now exposed, Attutmus resolved to go all in, leading his troops to attack the invading enemies with full force. His forces numbered over 20,000, while the enemies had only a little over 10,000. He was confident in overwhelming the enemy with superior numbers.

However, shortly after he threw his army into the battle with full force, Crassus arrived with the Roman main forces and surrounded them...

Seeing his familiar subordinates falling one after another beside him, Attutmus felt as if his heart was being torn apart.

"Leader, we’ll cover you, break out from here!" The blood-stained Guard Captain grabbed Attutmus’s right hand holding a short sword and anxiously pointed behind him.

Although Attutmus was somewhat exhausted, his mind was still clear. He understood that the Guard Captain’s suggestion to "break out" essentially meant for him to escape.

At that moment, he recalled Maximus’s words: "If one day your forces are in trouble, look toward the coast. Maybe the ships I sent to rescue you will be docked there..."

Attutmus glanced toward the coast, then resolutely turned his head away, forcefully shaking off the Guard Captain’s hand. Waving the short sword in his hand, he shouted fiercely, "I will never abandon my brothers and leave alone. If we die, we die together! Brothers, fight with me!"

"Kill!!! Kill these damned Romans!!!..." The soldiers, inspired, shouted in unison, their voices echoing across the battlefield.

Eventually, the shouts faded into silence...

............

After Spartacus broke through the long wall, he grandly advanced northward. However, as the army approached Locri, there were still no Roman forces pursuing from behind.

Feeling uneasy, Spartacus immediately led his troops to turn back.

At this time, they found that there wasn’t a single enemy visible on the long wall extending for dozens of miles. Only the eastern and western large camps were defended by Roman legions, which remained firm and unyielding no matter how they were cursed.

In fact, the camps were not heavily manned. Had the rebel army launched a strong attack, the Romans would have found it hard to defend. However, the rebel main forces had been trekking back and forth for a day, were very fatigued, and were too worn out to continue battling.

At this time, the leaders realized that the prospects for Attutmus’s forces left behind in the Regium region were grim. Although Spartacus was deeply regretful, he did not urge the warriors to return to the Regium region to try to rescue any possible survivors from Attutmus’s unit. Instead, he suggested: advance north as quickly as possible, shaking off this pursuit by the Roman Army, and head towards the vicinity of Brindisi.

He believed that since Maximus was able to communicate through the pirates, it indicated that the pirates in the Adriatic Sea were relatively reliable. Perhaps they could be heavily compensated to transport them to Rome’s Greek Province, where the Roman military might would presumably be weaker, giving them a better chance to develop.

Other leaders, perturbed over the potential demise of Attutmus’s unit and unwilling to escape into the barbaric lands north of the Alpine region, quickly accepted Spartacus’s suggestion.

............

With the arrival of the new year, the Official Tribe Members of the Nix Tribe remained very busy. With the assistance of the Reserve Tribe Members, they finally finished plowing their fields. Under the guidance of the Agricultural Department, they started learning how to compost and fertilize, so families no longer relieved themselves anywhere but instead dug cesspools in their yards to produce their fertilizer for themselves.

Maximus’s award to the carpenter Tetilipus at the land division meeting sparked greater enthusiasm among the artisans.

Before the year end, the first batch of iron ore Pigeris purchased from the Alde Tribe had arrived in Snowdonia.

Meanwhile, the first batch of stone bricks was also fired, and the artisans quickly used some of the bricks mixed with mud to build two rudimentary lime kilns: one kiln for burning quicklime and the other, following Maximus’s suggestion, to crush limestone and iron ore into powder, mix them with clay, and calcine them in the kiln, using the previously made charcoal as fuel.

After calcining for most of the day, the mixture was removed from the kiln, cooled, and then mixed with river sand and water to create a slurry, which was applied between the stone bricks to build a small wall. The entire surface was also covered in a layer of slurry, which took approximately five to six days to fully harden into a gray-red wall. It took a strong burly man slamming into it with considerable force to break it down.

The participating artisans were jubilant because they believed the kiln-fired mixture wasn’t much inferior to Roman cement.

Maximus observed the entire process. Though he felt the resulting product was far inferior to the cement of his past life—lower temperature, coarser powder, and containing more impurities, which led to slower hardening and lower strength—it was an achievement that required no volcanic ash, far better than ordinary mud, making traditional stone houses sturdier and kiln construction safer and more efficient. The artisans could continue experimenting to increase kiln temperatures and improve formulas... for better cement production.

Seeing the cement’s effects, the potters, though they had already made egg-shaped kilns out of clay, felt that this kind of calcined "cement" should make kiln construction more solid, less prone to cracking, and more conducive to controlling kiln temperatures. So they decided to dismantle the original kilns and rebuild them with cement.

The artisans at the Iron Workshop were also thrilled with the appearance of this cement because they discovered it was better suited for creating blast furnaces for ironmaking.

They had already begun constructing these commonly used blast furnaces from Roman military industry. In the center of the Iron Workshop in the Riverbend Industrial Zone, they dug a circular pit more than a meter deep and over two meters in diameter, planning to line the pit walls with stone bricks and coat them with cement. Once hardened, it would form a solid stone wall, which would then be built up further till the furnace rose two meters above ground (a total height of three meters).

Previously, after each ironmaking session in Sarabia, they had to repair the furnace walls since the clay-coated walls always showed some flaking at high temperatures. Their current observation, combined with past experiences, suggested that the high-temperature calcined cement used as lining inside the furnace chamber would likely not exhibit such flaking, saving them a lot of trouble. Moreover, cement-coated stone bricks would make the entire blast furnace sturdier and less prone to collapse.

Not only the Iron and Pottery Workshops, but even the charcoal burners and brick kiln workers also proposed using this cement for their new kilns.

The newly produced cement was in such demand that the cement workers felt proud, even wishing to use cement to refurbish their lime kilns. However, the surging demand also posed a problem.

The materials for cement were easy to obtain, and firing them in the kiln wasn’t an issue. The problem lay in crushing. Crushing limestone and iron ore into powder took considerable manpower. With the surge in demand, finely crushing large quantities of limestone and iron ore became a significant challenge.

This issue quickly shifted to be addressed by the Iron Workshop, since grinding iron ore into iron powder was an essential step in ironmaking. The Iron Workshop had long devised a mature process for this, using hydrodynamic hammers to crush iron ore and water mills or grinders to grind the crushed ore into powder.

In fact, hydrodynamic hammers and water mills were already under construction, spearheaded by the recently tribe-recognized engineer Spukala and carpenter Tetilipus.

Ever since the completion of the two wooden bridges, the massive team of carpenters had begun diversifying into other projects.

A portion took responsibility for building the docks at Snowdonia Village.

Because the Nix Tribe currently had only four small boats and there was little demand for shipping, the demand for dock construction was relatively low. Thus, the dock to be built was small and had simple facilities. With the pile drivers captured from battles with the Roman Army in Italy, the carpenters worked quickly, and the dock was almost complete. In a few days, the four small boats would be able to travel back and forth between Snowdonia and Westeni.

Compared to the rapid dock construction, the performance of the shipwrights’ workshop appeared incredibly slow.

Although the workshop was staffed with seasoned shipwrights from Sarabia rather than amateurs, their previous commitment to bridge building had left them no time to organize the workshop. Now just beginning to construct various facilities in the workshop and selecting suitable ship timber for seasoning, although everyone was working hard, the preparations for shipbuilding were all that had been completed thus far, with not a shadow of a new ship in sight yet.